Karadzic wages paperwork blitz in war crimes trial

[May 15, 2009]  THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- Radovan Karadzic has been a psychiatrist, a poet, a leader of Bosnia's Serbs and a fugitive disguised as a new age guru. Now he has assumed yet another persona -- a lawyer defending himself against charges of genocide and mass murder.

In the nine months since Serbian police swooped on him as he rode a Belgrade bus, Karadzic has shaved his beard, trimmed his hair, put on a business suit and assembled a team of volunteer legal experts from around the world to advise him as he does battle with the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal.

Unlike Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who tried to turn his trial into a political show, Karadzic has so far largely shunned political grandstanding and instead is using the legal system to the maximum.

He has unleashed an avalanche of nearly 100 pretrial motions and briefs -- against the U.N. court's right to try him, against the gag order it imposed on him, against prosecutors' claims that his English is good enough not to need legal documents and transcripts translated into Serbian, as he has demanded.

Karadzic is accused of orchestrating ethnic cleansing campaigns from the opening shots of Bosnia's war in 1992 to its blood-soaked climax with the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslims at the eastern enclave of Srebrenica.

If convicted, the 63-year-old could well end his days in prison.

Central to his effort to avoid facing the three-judge tribunal is his claim that in 1996 U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke offered him immunity from prosecution in return for dropping out of public life. Holbrooke, now a State Department special envoy, denies cutting such a deal, and tribunal judges say that even if it was true, it would not bind them.

Several other challenges to the court's jurisdiction already have been rejected by judges.

After the tribunal barred him from talking directly to the media, he demanded that the same restrictions apply to his prosecutors. He also has filed numerous motions seeking access to confidential material from previous trials.

At pretrial hearings some exchanges turned humorous, such as when Karadzic and Scottish judge Iain Bonomy had a lighthearted debate about the appropriateness of holding a hearing on St. George's Day, a religious holiday in Serbia, and whether St. George was the patron saint of Scotland. Bonomy pointed out that St. Andrew is Scotland's patron saint.

Bonomy appears determined to move proceedings along fast so that the trial can start this year. In an attempt to stem the flood of documents -- the court's database on Friday listed 349 briefs, letters, responses and motions -- he told Karadzic to stop firing off repetitive written replies to prosecutors' responses to his motions.

"You don't need to be afraid that because you have not said something twice the trial chamber will not think you really mean it," Bonomy told him.

Karadzic's first pretrial judge, Alphons Orie, was removed after Karadzic complained about his involvement in previous trials that convicted Serbs. He has accused another judge of bias and asked that he be replaced.

Karadzic sits alone in the courtroom facing a battery of prosecutors, but the image can be deceptive. Peter Robinson, an attorney from Santa Rosa, California, who is helping organize Karadzic's defense, says seven law professors and lecturers and 19 law students from 10 countries are working for free, while the tribunal is paying for a further four lawyers and an investigator for Karadzic.

"The Karadzic case is a high-profile case so it's prestigious to some degree to have worked on it," Robinson told The Associated Press.

But Karadzic, who has no legal training, is determined to be in control. "He's very hands on," said Robinson.

The attorney visits Karadzic regularly in his jail close to the Dutch North Sea coast and reviews legal challenges and preparations for trial.

Karadzic's insistence on defending himself sparked fears he would delay proceedings, as did Milosevic, his political mentor, whose trial for atrocities in the former Yugoslavia dragged on more than four years until he died of a heart attack in 2006.

Alex Whiting, a former tribunal prosecutor who teaches law at Harvard, says Karadzic's strategy is very different from Milosevic's. Milosevic used his trial as a political platform, whereas "Karadzic very much is engaging the legal arguments," Whiting says. He is "challenging the prosecution theories and in this way is actually participating in the process in a way Milosevic never did."

Robinson says that while Karadzic still believes he should not be tried, "he wants his day in court."

Karadzic remains convinced that he had a deal with Holbrooke which should have exempted him from being tried, Robinson says. "But if he is then he wants to have his side of the story told."

[Associated Press; By MIKE CORDER]

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.